One Last Shot

HIS SWOLLEN HANDS WOULD NOT GRIP THE HANDLEBAR. His disfigured right leg would not bend.

Even with a fistful of nitroglycerin pills and a few doses of morphine to mask what he described as his sometimes “nine out of ten” pain, Wally Ghia, 74, could not sit stable on his bike. A cluster of men gathered around him, hoisting here and steadying there.

They held Wally’s slender arms and clutched his loose-fitting jersey, pushing him up one side of his fat-tired mountain bike—and he fell right off the other side. His black spandex shorts smacked the sidewalk.

On a bridge spanning the Arkansas River in Salida, Colorado, between a pair of planters bursting with red and white and purple flowers, beside the tall trees and green grass of the town’s Riverside Park, Wally and 57 other riders were gathered for the start of the Banana Belt Mountain Bike Race, part of the town’s cycling festival, held every September. In about 20 minutes, at 11 a.m., someone would yell “Go!” and the mass of racers—smelling of sunscreen and sweat, a few fast, most just here for fun—would charge out of town, loop around a stretch of the river, and ride up into the Rockies.

Eventually, Wally’s team of helpers succeeded. They hoisted him up again and held him stable on his purple, full-suspension, carbon fiber bike. They clipped his feet into the pedals, and he attempted to spin the cranks. But his right knee seized.

“Faaack!” he shouted.

He could accept that he was dying. But not being able to race? That really pissed him off.

Wally with Conchetta outside his home in Mancos, Colorado.

Kennan Harvey

FOUR YEARS EARLIER, Flavio “Wally” Ghia stood up and introduced himself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Mancos, Colorado. For nearly 30 years he had credited the organization’s fellowship, as well as its non-denominational belief in a higher power, with helping him stay sober. So, in 2012, upon arriving in this small southwestern town in the shadow of the San Juan Range of the Rocky Mountains, Wally contacted the local chapter.

At 70, Wally appeared tan and trim, with a smoothly shaven head and a white goatee framing his face. He wore a pair of Italian sunglasses with yellow lenses and held a brown American Staffordshire Terrier at his side—the dog’s mouth muzzled. Upon viewing Wally for the first time, another meeting attendee recalled thinking, “Who the fuck is this guy?”

But Wally, gruff, frank, and funny, soon ingratiated himself to the group. “I’m a member of an exclusive club,” he would say. “In a town of 1,300, there are only so many drunks.” Wally possessed unending, somewhat unbelievable stories: about his time as a teenage runaway, adrift in Acapulco, Mexico; his career as a self-taught graphic designer in Manhattan, a real-life rendition of Mad Men; and his role as a star witness in a mob-related murder trial in Phoenix, for which he was later portrayed in a made-for-TV movie.

Mostly, though, Wally liked to talk about bikes. He claimed to have once been a masters state champion mountain bike racer in Arizona, and he wore a hoodie bearing the logo of Absolute Bikes, a well-known Salida shop. Wally said the shop’s owner, Shawn Gillis, was one of his “tough guys,” a crew of top mountain bikers who raced on teams Wally had assembled back in the 1990s, sponsored by brands like Ritchey, ProFlex, and Diamondback. His new friends in Mancos could tell, Wally believed, that clearly he was “no poser.”

Wally liked to hang out at Zuma, a natural-foods store. The woman who baked the blueberry muffins there, Suzanne, learned just how Wally liked them. And the man who owned the store, “Cowboy Steve” Klumker, accepted Wally’s offer to help bolster Zuma’s street presence. He designed a new sign that capitalized on the store’s location, facing Highway 160 at the only stoplight in town.

Design came innately to Wally—he’d once been dubbed a “design genius” and had a knack for packaging and selling things. He’d grown up in south Brooklyn, New York, near Gravesend Bay, primarily raised by loving grandparents. His father had traveled the world leading the Merchant Marine Band, and once returned from England with a Raleigh bicycle for Wally, which (until it was stolen) the boy used to explore his neighborhood. At 13, when Wally’s mother moved him to Philadelphia and away from his grandparents, he rebelled. He was 15 when he ran off to Acapulco, where he worked at resorts along the beach, and for a local silk screener.

After a couple of years, he hitchhiked back to the East Coast and at 18, with zero design or marketing experience and few connections, moved to Manhattan with the intent of working for a top design company. He saw that print shops worked closely with those firms, so he found a menial job cleaning old linotype machines for one. He made himself indispensible and took night classes at esteemed art schools like Pratt Institute and The Cooper Union.

The pop illustrator Peter Max brought a project to the shop, and Wally eagerly assisted him. That led Wally, in 1961, to a job at Max’s firm, the Daly & Max Studio, a collection of New York’s hottest young designers. “We were kind of the first renegade group” in Manhattan, Wally told the Phoenix New Times in 1982, adding, “During that period of time, we did a lot of drugs.”

Wally and his cohorts would regularly get high on laboratory-grade LSD, and would sample strains of exotic marijuana. Fueled by intoxicants, Wally worked feverishly. But after conflicts with Max, Wally left and took a job as the art director at Bantam Books. By the age of 22, he had earned accolades as a rising star from a writer in the New York Post (who also noted his appetite for the sedative Tuinal). Eventually he left Bantam to start his own firm, and maintained his rampant chemical abuse. “In the early ’60s, the crazier you were in this business, the more you made,” Wally told the New Times.

He sold highly sought-after packaging designs to some of the most well-known brands of the era—Jell-O 1-2-3, Shake ’N Bake, and Maxwell House. “I always looked at supermarkets as the real battleground for designers,” Wally said to the New Times. “That three-fourths-of-a-second recognition time was where I wanted to play. If you were any good, that’s where you belonged.”

Wally moved out of the city and into a large glass-walled house on a lush compound. He filled his garage with a Range Rover and a Lotus, and took to vacationing at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a popular 1970s hangout for politicians and celebrities ranging from Mick Jagger to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

His success in New York continued, but Wally’s manic work schedule combined with his chronic drug use occasionally devolved into what appeared to be psychotic episodes. He was briefly institutionalized, and upon his release decided to leave the New York area. He worked in Toronto and Los Angeles before finally settling in Phoenix in 1974. There, Wally intended to bring his big-time ad experience to the emerging city in the middle of the desert.

But his addictions and his associations with beyond-the-law characters would erode those aspirations. In 1982, he played a key role in a sordid murder trial—a mob-related hit on one of his business associates. Afterward, fearing for his life, he fled the state and changed his name (he’d been born Wally Roberts). He carried a loaded pistol, strapped a knife to his leg, and kept a pit bull at his side. From then on, anytime he felt threatened, his armor went up. He would cut ties with a close friend or partner over a minor disagreement. He found himself completely isolated.

Then, after more than a year on the run, he returned to Phoenix and got clean. He would discover the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and find solace in the spirituality of Eastern philosophies. He would come to view himself as a samurai, a lone warrior of wisdom and honor, who would take his own life before submitting to the enemy. Wally started collecting samurai swords and would often cite “The Way of Walking Alone,” written by legendary samurai, Musashi Miyamoto.

He found himself drawn to cycling. “The only thing that could replace heroin,” he would say. He recalled the bright packs of riders he saw as a boy, whirring through Brooklyn, gesticulating and speaking Italian, and modeled himself after them. He transformed into an athlete. He’d rise each morning before the sun, slip an old Tour de France tape into the VCR, and get ready to ride. With his muscular calves and lean physique, even at 50 he could trade pulls with racers half his age.

In 1990, Wally founded a mountain-bike racing team, which would soon become nationally competitive. He did design work for his sponsors, Rain-X and Diamondback. He dubbed his team Team Rhino, because rhinos, Wally said, “never give up. They never stop charging.” The team members, Wally’s “tough guys,” truly were. One racer, a downhiller named Kim Sonier, would go on to compete at World Cup races in Europe and place second at the world championships in 1992 and 1993. Another rider, Matt Quinn, would get a job with the Secret Service and serve on George W. Bush’s detail, which often involved riding mountain bikes with the president at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Yet another team member, Carl Tobin, would become a scientist and an expeditions expert for National Geographic.

Then in 1996, the night after a race, Wally suffered a heart attack. Complications and a series of open-heart surgeries would follow, but he would remain dedicated to riding—during his recovery, he would drag a stationary trainer onto his patio to spin in the open air. But, in 2004, just as he started to regain his strength, he began a life-threatening battle with the flesh-eating bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis (Wally would actually trademark the term “necfash”), and spent months in a burn unit.

In 2005, he moved to Sarasota, Florida, in an unsuccessful attempt to repair his relationship with his dying mother. He could no longer race a bike, but would lead moonlight rides around a 16-mile paved loop in Myakka River State Park. Wally met a woman in Sarasota, a ranger who worked in the park, named Lisa Rhodin. She would come scoop Wally up if he suffered some misfortune on a ride, a mechanical breakdown or a complication from his eroding health.

For dates, the couple would go to a place in the park called Deep Hole, where gators gathered by the hundreds. Women had long been drawn to Wally (he married five times), but he said he’d never felt a love like this before. And when Lisa eventually left him, when she moved away to Montana without him, he said he’d never felt pain like that, either.

In 2011, more or less on a whim, Wally relocated to Mancos, back to the high plains of the west. In Mancos, Wally would be able to enjoy views of both desert mesas and snowcapped peaks, and would develop a community of friends and caretakers.

He had little money left, and few job prospects. He didn’t plan on moving again.

Wally prepares for the Banana Belt mountain bike race on his home roads outside Mancos, Colorado.

Kennan Harvey

OF THE MANY friends Wally made in Mancos, he counted Joan and Peter Brind’Amour among his closest. The middle-aged couple, who’d recently decided to sell their organic farm to refocus on their health, lived around the corner from Wally’s rental home and shared his passion for bikes. They’d moved to Mancos in 1997, because they sought a place where they could grow their own food, and because they’d found Mancos hospitable to cyclists. “We liked to test a town’s friendliness by riding the roads and checking out the reception to spandex,” says Joan. The couple would regularly stop by Wally’s home to visit, or to walk his dog, Conchetta—because Wally often couldn’t do so.

Though he spoke in vagaries about his health, Wally clearly suffered from a number of serious maladies. When asked, he would tell people he moved to Mancos to ride and train for the Senior Games. But, says Peter, “I never saw Wally on a bike.” Most visibly, his bout of necrotizing fasciitis had nearly forced doctors to amputate his right leg and rendered the limb permanently disfigured from his ankle to his thigh.

Wally also periodically endured severe heart pain, a condition known as angina, that persisted even after three open-heart surgeries. The vise-like pressure would start in his chest and spread to his arms, neck, and jaw, and upset his stomach, causing him to bend over the toilet and heave. Peter recalls catching Wally at home on an especially bad day. “All he could do was sit in his chair with his head in his hands and sway,” Peter says.

The most recent blow to Wally’s health came in Mancos, on a mule ride with Cowboy Steve—Wally said riding the beasts reminded him of mountain biking, of “being out in the shit.” But while riding the mule through a steep gully, Wally leaned back when he should have leaned forward. He fell and hit his head, causing his brain to bleed. A helicopter transported Wally to a neurology center in Farmington, New Mexico, where doctors drilled holes in his skull to drain blood and relieve pressure. The procedure saved his life, but the injury left Wally with debilitating nerve damage, unsure balance, and an intermittently foggy mind.

Steve and his family helped Wally recover after his fall, and Peter and Joan also served as volunteer caretakers, driving Wally to various visits at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango. But modern medicine could do only so much for a man in his 70s with a waning heart. One day in 2016, Wally emerged from the hospital looking uncharacteristically dour. The doctors had given him a letter, and he read a line aloud to Peter and Joan: “There is nothing more we can do for you.”

Wally had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and referred to hospice care, which would provide pain relief as well as emotional and spiritual support. “That was quite a rude awakening,” Peter says. Flavio “Wally” Ghia was dying.

As the trio drove back through the mountains to Mancos, Joan attempted to lighten the mood and cracked a dark joke. “You could start a new bike racing team,” she told Wally. “Hospice Racing.” Everyone laughed at the morbid absurdity of the suggestion, a bike racing team for people who are dying. Peter chimed in, “Your tagline could be, ‘Bury the competition.’ ”

Wally, ever the marketer, seemed to gain energy from the notion. “No, it needs to be more aggressive,” he said. “Burying the competition.”

The joke became a reality. Within weeks of entering hospice care, Wally started working to bring Hospice Racing to life, creating a logo for his one-man racing team (a purple exclamation point with the imprint of a mountain bike tread across the name), and handed out Hospice Racing stickers at hospitals. “Everyone loved them,” he said.

He placed calls to potential sponsors, like his old friend Shawn Gillis at Absolute Bikes (who convinced Wally to change the tagline to, “A Happier Ending”) and ordered large Hospice Racing decals to turn his SUV into an official team vehicle. “It was like, ‘Okay, what’s next? Bring it on,’ ” Peter says. “He wasn’t going to wallow.”

Wally developed a deep appreciation for his team of in-home hospice caretakers. A social worker, Crystal Harris, helped Wally put together a list of friends and loved ones he wanted to keep informed about his condition, and assisted in coordinating a housekeeping service for him. Gail Bertram, who lived just down the street from Wally, became his hospice nurse and managed the array of narcotics he took to quell the symptoms of his various conditions. “They took the pain away,” Wally would say. “With the things I’ve had, it’s like a miracle.”

Today, hospice care may seem commonplace—about 46 percent of all Americans who die each year utilize it—but the practice is relatively new. In the US, the first dedicated medical practice to care for the dying wasn’t established until 1974, in Branford, Connecticut. And, in 1982, the year before Congress fully incorporated federal funding for hospice benefits into Medicare coverage, just 25,000 Americans were served in hospice. By 1984, it was 100,000.

The exponential increase in hospice may reflect a wider shift in how we perceive death, from denying the inevitable and seeking ongoing medical interventions, to accepting our mortality and aiming to make our final moments as gratifying as possible. Wally’s bike racing team for the dying (namely, himself) didn’t necessarily surprise his hospice caretakers, who’d helped a number of patients fulfill similar desires. “I had one woman who wanted to see the beach, so we helped her get to the coast,” says Gail. “She died right there, with her feet in the sand.”

After overcoming his drug addictions, Wally would say that much of what he would do professionally, “I would do with an end game for cycling. Because cycling gave me so much.” With Hospice Racing, he sought to use his bike to bring awareness to hospice care, and to show how hospice was allowing him to live his life, all the way to the end. Without debilitating pain, Wally believed that maybe he could ride a bike again.

At the start of the summer in 2016, Wally called Shawn and told him, “Look, I’ve got to do a race. Without me doing a race, it’s all bullshit.”

Shawn told Wally about an upcoming event in Salida, the Banana Belt Mountain Bike Race. The race, the name of which pays homage to the town’s location in a perpetually sunny part of the Rockies (a banana belt), had been around since 1989 and was part of the bike-crazy mountain town’s annual fall cycling festival.

Then Shawn asked Wally a question, “Can you ride a bike anymore?”

“I don’t know,” Wally replied.

IN EARLY JUNE, Peter and Wally met Shawn at his shop in Salida, a four-hour drive northeast of Mancos, for what Wally called, “an audition.” Because of his leg, his heart, and the mule, Wally hadn’t ridden a bike in eight years. Sensing Wally’s enthusiasm, Shawn tried to temper expectations. “We’ll just see what happens,” he told Wally.

Shawn suggested Wally ride a women’s Specialized Rhyme FSR 6Fattie. “We didn’t tell him it was a women’s bike right away, but it was purple,” says Shawn, who believed the 6Fattie’s three-inch wide tires and upright position would help Wally balance. And the dropper seatpost would help Wally get on and off the bike. Any time Wally stopped, he could lower the post and plant both his feet on the ground. Wally asked question after question about the bike. “If I’m going to be sponsored, I need to know my stuff,” he said.

When Wally started pedaling, Shawn ran after him, holding the back of the bike’s saddle like a parent pushing a child off for the first time. After fifteen feet or so, Wally shouted back, “I got it!” Shawn got on his own bike, and the old friends rode two miles or so down an empty side street.

Shawn sent Wally back to Mancos with the $4,500 carbon fiber bike, and in the months that followed, Peter and Wally prepared for the race. On their first ride together, the two men went to the quarter-mile high school track, Peter aboard an old titanium mountain bike he’d converted into an around-town cruiser. “I don’t even know if we made it around twice,” Peter says. But Wally progressed. Soon, Peter says, “He was calling me all the time.” Peter and Wally would ride two or three days a week, and Wally eagerly anticipated each outing.

The two men figured out how to tailor Wally’s drug intake to allow him to ride: enough morphine to relieve the pain, but not so much that he couldn’t sit straight on the bike. On their rides, Peter would bring a small bottle of nitroglycerin pills, which would instantly dilate Wally’s blood vessels and quell a sudden episode of angina. And Wally found a strain of marijuana at the local dispensary that could get at the nerve pain that the morphine couldn’t reach. “He smoked marijuana more or less nonstop,” says Peter.

To get Wally on his bike, Peter would sit on the front tire and hold the handlebar, “my legs to the sides like outriggers,” he says, so Wally could swing up and on. As Wally’s stamina increased, they ventured beyond the track. They would ride from Wally’s house south on Weber Canyon Road toward the mountains. Near the local cemetery, they would encounter a small hill and turn around. They’d ride back toward town and turn right on East Montezuma Street, a gravel road with a gradual uphill slope. “We didn’t do a whole lot of talking on the bike. Wally had to be pretty focused, just so he could keep the bike upright and breathe,” Peter says. When Wally would talk, he’d exclaim, “Oh my god, this is so great!” Where East Montezuma hit the edge of town, Peter and Wally would turn around and coast home.

“It was clear from the first time he got on the bike—here’s somebody who has spent a lot of time riding,” Peter says. “Maneuvers as simple as turning around, he’d ratchet with his one better leg to maintain his balance and keep the bike moving.”

Only once did Wally attempt to ride by himself. Peter came by in the afternoon and found Wally covered in bruises. Wally told Peter, “Some little old lady ran me off the road.” He was unhurt, and the incident only bolstered his eagerness for riding. He’d crashed. Now he was a real rider again.

After three months of preparation, race day arrived. On September 17, Peter and Wally loaded up the mountain bike and headed back to Salida. Wally wore a jersey bearing the Absolute Bikes logo, and they drove Wally’s SUV, plastered in Hospice Racing decals. But in the weeks leading up to the event, Wally’s health had turned. His hands and feet had swollen. “He couldn’t control his hands. You’d give him a glass of water, and he’d drop it right in his lap,” Peter says.

In Salida, picking up Wally’s race number, Peter told Shawn, “I don’t know that Wally’s even going to be able to get on a bike.” As it turned out, he couldn’t.

“I found myself on my ass,” Wally said.

“There were five of us trying to get him on the bike,” Shawn says. “We looked like a NASCAR pit crew.”

Everything Wally had worked toward, he now saw crumbling. He tried to spin the cranks, and his right knee seized. Here on this street in Salida, near the planters bursting with flowers and the tall trees and the green grass of Riverside Park, Wally shouted in frustration.

Wally and Shawn Gillis at the Banana Belt mountain bike race in Salida, Colorado, on September 17, 2016.

Kennan Harvey

WITH ONLY 20 MINUTES or so remaining to the start of the race, Shawn had an idea.

“We’ve got a tandem in the back of the shop,” he said to Wally. “Do you want to ride on the back?”

Wally looked at Shawn. “Go get it!”

The two men lined up near the front of the pack on Shawn’s Electra tandem. The step-through rear end of the cruiser-style tandem made it easier for Wally to climb aboard, and the bike’s high handlebar gave him a better grip.

Someone shouted, “Go!” The pack surged forward and Shawn pedaled hard. The 26-mile course circled Salida on a flat three-mile loop before climbing into the nearby mountains. For a time, Wally was among the leaders as they raced through the two-story brick buildings lining Salida’s historic downtown. Shawn leaned forward on the tandem so Wally could see. And Wally watched as the sea of riders turned right, across the Arkansas River on an old steel bridge, and then right again, tracing the edge of the clear river on a bumpy dirt road. On the tandem, the two men could banter, and it reminded Shawn of when they raced in Arizona, when Shawn would catch Wally on the trail. Some competitors wouldn’t yield, but Wally would always pull to the side, always offer Shawn encouragement.

Where the course looped back through town, Wally and Shawn rolled to a stop as the rest of the riders continued up into the mountains. Wally changed out of his riding gear into street clothes and breathed in oxygen from a metal tank he and Peter had brought. He positioned himself near the start-finish line to cheer on other racers. The event winner, a then 38-year-old pro from Durango named Nick Gould, noticed Wally after crossing the line. The pair struck up a conversation. “Did you race, too?” Nick asked, and Wally told Nick about his ride, and about how he was dying. Before leaving, Nick asked Wally, “Can we get a picture together?”

Following the race, Nick invited Wally to speak at a psychology class he was taking as a prerequisite for grad school. Wally agreed (“I got a standing ovation, by the way,” he said), and afterward, the dying racer and the young pro got lunch. Wally learned that Nick managed his own team, sponsored by Durango’s Ska Brewing and Zia Taqueria, as well as Trek. Nick listened to Wally talk about his plans for Hospice Racing. Wally believed if he could race, others in hospice could, too.

“I’m not that terminally unique,” he told Nick.

Wally made plans to race again, at the Cactus Classic in November, an event on what he called his “home trails” in Cave Creek, Arizona, near Phoenix. Nick, who holds a degree in exercise science, offered to help Wally train. He came to Mancos and led Wally through strength and balance exercises. “He was so alive,” recalls Nick. Peter, similarly, remembers that he and Joan used to tease Wally, “You sure don’t look like someone who’s dying of congestive heart failure. And he would get mad at us, because he knew how much pain he was in.”

But the week of the Cactus Classic, Wally’s health worsened. A nurse found him in his home, unresponsive. She contacted Crystal, who called Wally’s friends, and suggested they visit.

Wally didn’t want to die alone. “Sometimes, he would call me in the middle of the night,” Joan says. “He’d say, ‘I’m dying right now, can you come hold my hand?’ ”

Gail visited and listened to Rascal Flatts with him. Suzanne sent blueberry muffins from Zuma. Shawn drove from Salida and shared stories about the “tough guys.” Nick stopped in on his way to race the Cactus Classic. “Go win the fucker,” Wally told Nick. Which Nick would do.

As his friends gathered around him, Wally regained consciousness and slowly recovered. “It’s scary,” he said. “One moment I think I’m going to die, and the next moment I’m back.”

About a week later, he decided he wanted to ride again. So on November 16, Nick came back to Wally’s home in Mancos for a training session. Peter and Joan were there, preparing Wally some food. Wally took a triple dose of morphine in order to get on the bike.

Nick helped Wally put on his cycling shorts, compression socks, and shoes. They did some light stretching to open up Wally’s hips and make it easier for him to swing his leg over his bike, which sat on a stationary trainer. Then Wally warmed up with ten minutes of spinning. He focused on his posture and alignment, pulling up through the pedal stroke. Nick suggested a few intervals, anywhere from one to three minutes long. He told Wally the effort should feel like a six or seven out of ten, and as Wally pressed harder on the pedals, Nick suggested Wally close his eyes and visualize riding on the open road.

Wally sees himself aboard an Italian racing bike, amidst the red desert mountains in Phoenix, with the sun breaking through the morning sky. He’s among a pack of riders, racing to the summit of South Mountain on a strip of serpentine blacktop, sweat seeping across his smooth and defined legs. As his weakened heart works harder, Wally sees himself at a weeknight criterium, racing in the twilight. When the pace slows he surges from the field. He sees his team of “tough guys,” the gray dirt of the Cave Creek trails caked across their shins.

Peter watched as Wally rode, and wondered aloud if the effort might kill him. “I’m trying my best!” Wally replied. If he died on his bike, he said, “That’d be perfect.”

But he doesn’t die.

Nick Gould runs Wally through a coaching session on November 16, 2016.

Kennan Harvey

TWO DAYS AFTER Wally’s training session with Nick, Lisa “Montana,” as Wally affectionately calls her, comes to Mancos. He’d sent her an email, explaining his condition. She is, he says, “the one true love of my life,” and his eyes fill with tears.

“I just want to hold her one more time.”

They spend four quiet days together in Wally’s home. On the fourth day, at 3 a.m., Wally loses consciousness. His skin turns gray and his belly descends. His breaths becomes sporadic, and he seems to gurgle as he sucks in air.

Peter sits by Wally and holds his hand. Joan’s there, and Gail, and Nick, too. Wally had applied to the Dream Foundation, a nonprofit that grants final wishes. He had wanted to pay Nick for his training sessions, to work toward racing in one more event. The Foundation had agreed to write a check to grant Wally’s wishes, and had sent a letter to Nick saying so. Gail tells Nick that in death, a person’s hearing is one of the last senses to go, and so Nick sits beside Wally and reads him the letter.

Wally had known he would likely never line up again. A week earlier, he’d given voice to what fate was telling him: “Yeah, shithead, you got one race left. We ain’t giving you two.” But that knowledge hadn’t hindered him from trying. “Whether I live or I’m dead,” he had said, “it’s a good story.”

Wally lies in his bed on cowboy sheets, baby blue and rust red, decorated with bucking broncos. A friend had purchased them for him, and it was on those sheets that he’d specified he pass away.

“It will be soon,” Gail announces, and she leans down close over Wally’s chest. At 11:58 a.m. on November 22, Wally appears to stop breathing. Gail leans in even closer, her ear directly over his mouth. And just then, Wally takes one last heaving gulp of air. Gail jumps. Then she smiles.

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